Time Warner Cable has modestly softened its plan to test usage limits for its broadband data customers. Landel Hobbs, the company’s chief operating officer, has just published a post with the new price tiers for a test of the plan it will conduct in four cities.
The company increased the capacity of the plans it had tested earlier in Texas. They had ranged from 5 to 40 gigabytes of uploading and downloading a month. Now those plans run from 10 to 60 gigabytes a month at prices that range between about $25 and $65 a month, depending on the area.
The company introduced a new plan with 100 gigabytes, for $75. Any more than that costs $1 a gigabyte. But there is a $75 cap on the extra fee, meaning unlimited use is capped at $150 a month.
Nasty, Nasty Cable
Time Warner runs cable on poles in municipal rights-of-way. Some of us actually own the land over which the roads and these cables run. Time Warner is a monopoly in most, maybe all, the areas in New York State it;s in but would seem never the less intent on increasing the costs of their new online competitors by using control of the pipeline to gain unfair advantage in programs. So where are our municipal leaders? Is there hope that wireless can provide a bit of needed competition?